Cooking With I See Pasta* And My Homemade Tomato Sauce Recipe!

Friday, 28 July 2017

Seaweed. Not something I ever thought I would be blogging about but when I got the chance to try out I See Pasta I thought 'why not?!'. I Sea Pasta is essentially Himanthalia a type of 'sea spaghetti' which grows wild in the sea and is seen as a sustainable alternative to normal pasta. So, would it convert me and my family? Only one way to find out! One word of warning before we go on though, there will be a distinct smell of salt and the sea whilst you're cooking it so you may want to cook this away from your guests/family and open a window if weather permits! haha! Also the cooking instructions were rather vauge and we were confused about how we needed to prepare it! We thought we had to steep it, then cook it..but it was only how tender/salty we wanted the pasta itself. I cooked it for about 20 minutes which was perfectly al-dente. The water will be a disgusting brown colour smelling incredibly salty and awful and needs to be thrown out immediately! You could in fact rinse the pasta in fresh cold water and then quickly re-heat it in a clean pan with fresh hot water to completely get rid of the salty taste if you preferred. I doubt very much it will affect the end result!

To go with this new pasta I made my homemade tomato sauce. It's easier to use one from a tin but just sometimes it's nice to take the time to make one and it's really easy!

Ingredients:

5-6 tomatoes

1 big onion or 3-4 shallots

1-2 clove/s of garlic

Tomato puree

1-2 tablespoons of Red Pesto

Method:

- Score each tomato underneath so it is easier to remove the skins

- Place in a bowl with hot water - enough to cover

- Leave for a few minutes until they become soft and skins start peeling away

- Chop up the onion or shallots and garlic

- Heat a pan on the hob with some oil, when hot add onion/shallots and cook until soft

- Add the garlic

- Take tomatoes out of hot water and run under cold water. Take skins off and chop up, remembering to remove the stalk.

- Add to the pan with the red pesto and salt+pepper.

- Leave to simmer until all tomatoes have reduced/everything is cooked.

- You can leave it chunky like I did or use a stick blender to make it smooth! It's upto you!

- Add more salt+pepper to taste.

Simples!

As you can see here, I added Broccoli to my sauce, mainly because it needed using! A fab way to get more of your 5-a-day!

And here's the finished bowl! I See Pasta with Homemade Tomato Sauce. We enjoyed it but the overwhelming smell of sea-salt almost put us off completely!! Like I said before, steeping it before cooking and then rinsing in fresh water before re-heating again may make the smell and salty-ness go away but it was good to try it and see what it was like! Not sure if I could make the change over to seaweed pasta but if it was available It's good to have a veggie meal every once in a while and as seaweed is as plentiful as they suggest then it may well be a good and conscious decision on behalf of your health and the planet!

Here's what my Mum thought:

" Smelt pretty bad, very salty and of the sea, but didn't taste like that at all. Quite tasty and a good pasta substitute, but don't think i'd buy it "

I hope I haven't put you off! it was good to try it but wouldn't be our first purchase if we were looking to replace pasta. Find out more from the link below.